LINDISFARNE CAFE

Thinking Otherwise – The Big Picture:
Reflections on Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines

by William Irwin Thompson

Organisms adapt to environments through immediate catastrophes and not to abstract information about possible future environments.

Cyanobacteria, who obtain their energy through photosynthesis, did not stop excreting oxygen to maintain themselves in their niche or comfort zone; they continued to produce oxygen until the catastrophe of a new atmosphere sent them scurrying for safety in the covering of slime at the bottom of lakes or inside the intestines of beings like us who take in oxygen gladly and exhale carbon-dioxide.

Now natural history repeats itself as we exhale far too much carbon-dioxide for our own good. Although we are conscious organisms that now read newspapers and scientific journals, there are still those among us who have not evolved to the point that information and consciousness have replaced things in our new Umwelt, so they refuse to believe that the atmosphere is changing and now generating a catastrophe or a whole series of catastrophes.

Catastrophe is a Greek word meaning “turning over,” so when I turned over a pitchfork-full of compost in the organic garden at Lindisfarne at Fishcove in the 1970s, I literally created a catastrophe for the anaerobic bacteria in the pile. When stars explode in supernovae, they cast heavy metals into space that later with the help of gravity will cluster into planets. Our planet has an iron core rich in radioactive elements that produces the magnetic field that now protects life on Earth. Looking at exploding stars and colliding galaxies and dark energy compressed black holes, one cannot escape the conclusion that catastrophes are part of the generative architecture of existence.

As I scurried inside my warm home today to escape the cold of the season in Maine, I was grateful for the oil that was heating my 1857 Victorian apartment building. To freeze to death is not the most comfortable way to shuffle off our mortal coil. No American President would dare run the risk of anarchy and civil war were there to be no heating oil delivered in fall and winter and no gasoline at the pump. So we need not have energy tycoons like Bush and Cheney running the government, a Democratic Obama will do just as well to say yes to pipelines from the tar sands oil in Alberta to the refineries in New Orleans, yes to nuclear power, and yes to fracking and off-shore oil rigs everywhere. Industrial civilization can neither adapt nor evolve; it can only experience the terminal catastrophe it generates. Its shadow is an intimate part of its architecture, but we humans have not yet evolved to the point where the first question we ask of our designs is: What does it excrete and how can we make that poison part of the architecture of its nutritional or immune system?

China’s water table now shows increasingly high levels of arsenic poisoning; the semiconductor industries of Taiwan are also spilling mercury and lead into the water table, so it will not be long before all the tea in China is undrinkable, and it will also not be long before the next Fukushima-like nuclear catastrophe in France will make French wines a Recherche du temps perdu. So, collectors, stock up on China tea and French wines and forget about Bitcoins. Warren Buffet said he never invested in financial instruments he could not understand, so since very few people understand the algorithm that mines a Bitcoin with a very powerful computer, no one knows how to protect herself against the mining program becoming malware or a Trojan horse.

Industrial civilization cannot save itself by creating a marketplace for the buying, selling, and trading of pollution, for no matter who trades their fresh air and water for coal smoke, poisoned water tables, and radioactive fallout, it all has to go somewhere, and that somewhere is over the rainbow into the atmosphere and oceans.

In other words, industrial civilization can no more reform itself than the Papacy and the College of Cardinals could create the Renaissance, Reformation, and Scientific Revolution.

It will not be homo insipiens that evolves from environments of things to planetary processual flows of Mind; it will be the ecosphere as a whole. The extremophiles in the bottom of the sea and the deep mantle may not be disturbed by our surface perturbations as the sun becomes dramatically active again and the continents rumble and the ocean currents change directions, but the Mind of Gaia will move on, grateful to the little organisms of humans that proved as effective as bacteria in transforming the subterranean layers of solid coal and the lakes of liquid oil into a gas for a new atmosphere for a completely new world under the sun.

William Irwin Thompson

William Irwin Thompson (born July, 1938) is known primarily as a social philosopher and cultural critic, but he has also been writing and publishing poetry throughout his career and received the Oslo International Poetry Festival Award in 1986. He has made significant contributions to cultural history, social criticism, the philosophy of science, and the study of myth. He describes his writing and speaking style as “mind-jazz on ancient texts”. He is an astute reader of science, social science, history, and literature. He is the founder of the Lindisfarne Association.

His book, Still Travels: Three Long Poems was published in 2009 by Wild River Books. Order a copy from Amazon.